The ultimate Christmas booklist to celebrate the season

Discover diverse book picks for gifting this season, from Indian Christmas anthologies to Ruskin Bond's latest releases.

Two years ago, Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle edited Indian Christmas: An Anthology, published by Speaking Tiger Books, which gathered stories from all across the country about the indigenisation of the festival, seen in every aspect, from food (think the distinctive flavours of Christmas cake in say Thalassery or Allahabad or Kolkata), to decorations and even church services. It remains a favourite gifting choice for the season, but here are a few more book picks.

You can never go wrong with the grand old man of children’s books and a writer for all ages – Ruskin Bond. This year, as he turned 90 on May 19, several new books were released including Hold Onto Your Dreams: A Letter to Young Friends (Penguin), in which he shares experiences from his life, his inspiration (nature) and what helps him get on amid the doom and gloom, and the self-explanatory The Hill of Enchantment: The Story of My Life as a Writer (Aleph). Over the years, there have been many collections, omnibuses and anthologies of Bond’s stories and each is a wonderful gift option.

What’s Christmas without various types of cakes: chocolate plum cake, anyone? Well, if you wanted to know about a key ingredient, dip into Chocolate: A Global History by Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenoch (Pan Macmillan), first published in 2009, but an updated version has appeared this year. “Chocolate is complicated,” they write in the Introduction, tracing the growth of the ‘chocolate tree’, Theobroma cacao, to its journey to the world’s top chocolatiers and shops. They include recipes as well, ‘historic’ hot chocolate et al.

With climate change on everyone’s minds, this year’s Booker Prize winner, Orbital (Penguin) by Samantha Harvey is a must read. A slim novel, it describes a day in the life of six astronauts at the International Space Station and their reflections on life and earth, as they gaze wondrously at the blue planet.

The young Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki has been quite the rage with her bestselling novel, Butter, translated by Polly Barton. The story revolves around gourmet cook Manako Kajii who is convicted for the deaths of three lonely businessmen who she is said to have seduced with food.

With South Korean writer winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, her books, The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith (which was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2016), Human Acts, The White Book, Greek Lessons have all seen a rise in sales.

An old classic is also seeing a spurt in sales, thanks to a Netflix series. A new swarm of readers are likely to warm up to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the story of generations of the Buendia family set in fictional Macondo which is also an account of the twists and turns in Latin American history.